Visualisation Matters: Putting the human in the loop

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Visualisation needs RSEs

Imaging and visualisation has at its heart coding so the emergence of the Research Software Engineer as a career by being supported by the university, industrial and Research Council sectors is very welcome.

Vis From Manchester Central to being On the Top of The World – Still making the user via visualisation be deep within the HPC-Loop

Had the opportunity to present ideas of integrating human visualisation within the HPC (high-performance computation) loop. On 14 December 2016, Computing Insight UK 2016 launched with over 250 delegates and suppliers present; it was a great session to review the use of Visualisation within the Hartree Centre and describe how it has been important to keep the human in the visualisation/computational loop. This included the use of multi-use vis and discussion spaces as well as incorporating fat-memory GPU nodes at strategic locations; and then defined a future proposal to have an infinite job submission system that would stop only under human-visualisation control.

Needs for RSE to be integrated and employed

This talk was then modified and semi-repeated for a synchrotron (x-ray imaging) related workshop, an EU COST / PSI event on 9-12 January 2017 in Switzerland, which focused on the visualisation of complex imaging for a specific audience. For this we need software developers who can look at specific problems for users and have the dedicated time to create these solutions.

We submitting an EPSRC proposal with Manchester Research IT Services, for X-ray Tomographic Imaging, which is soon to successfully launch a new Flagship grant program in April 2017 – this will fund two RSEs from Manchester; Daniil Kazantsev (included in photo above 5th from right) and Jakob Sauer Jørgensen to revive the reconstruction codes within the reconstruction library; specifically these are for complex multi-channel data. Starting for three years both will be employed by the University of Manchester, but Daniil will be permanently based at the RAL – Harwell Campus next to the Diamond Light Source.